Monday, July 22, 2013

black, white and orange

AK and I were going to see World War Z in the theater with the comfy couches, but instead we
decided to see Fruitvale Stationin
the theater with the only-sort-of-comfy stadium seats, because we are socially
conscious like that.

Oscar and Tatiana.

The movie depicts the police shooting of Oscar Grant, an
unarmed African-American man who got into a scuffle with an acquaintance at a
BART station early New Year’s Day, 2009. According to the film, the shooting
happens as you might imagine: angry young black men, crowd roiling with energy
and alcohol, outnumbered cops ready to put a bullet in their own anxiety. It’s
hard to make a good movie about random violence because the nature of such
events is that they’re quick, confused and, well, random.

The film is fairly simple in structure, following Oscar’s
day in flashback as he hangs out with his family and tries to get rent money
without breaking the law or losing face. But this is no easy thing for a poor
kid with a conviction record—even if he has a naggingly loving mom and a sweet
disposition. Writer/director Ryan Coogler shows how, even if the shooting
itself is the result of a butterfly-effect bouquet of circumstances, it’s part of
a pattern that poor young black men experience every day.

Oscar faces what I think of as the Catalina Problem. To
put it in middle-class white-person terms: When you go to Catalina Island,
there’s an ice cream store on every corner, with two or three gelato shops in
between. They all smell like burnt sugar. They all sell chocolate-dipped waffle
cones. You ignore the first one because your boat has just arrived and it’s
only ten a.m. You ignore two more because you don’t want to be another dumb
tourist with an ice cream mustache getting sticky in the sun. But eventually
the dam of your willpower will burst, and you will eat a thousand-calorie snack,
and your body and society won’t give you any credit for the five ice cream
cones you didn’t eat.

No one gets off this island without looking like Big Olaf.

Oscar’s girlfriend doesn’t care that he chose not to sell
weed that day; she cares (understandably) that he rolled in late to his grocery
store job and got fired in the first place.

The character I related to most was Oscar’s mother,
played with warmth and worry by Octavia Spencer. She’s constantly telling him
to use his headset in the car and avoid getting a DUI. She knows that Oscar
lives in a world that has declared him dangerous, and this puts him in danger.
The fact that I identified with the mother of a twenty-two-year-old confirms
that I’m old. But I’m also thinking about how to raise a black son in America.

AK and I are back on the adoption market after being on
hold for a year. First we had some emotional shit to sort through. Then AK
decided to try to get pregnant (she didn’t). Then I got cancer. Theoretically,
we could get a call or an email from an expectant mother any day now. It’s such
a big deal that I felt blissfully hopeful for a minute, then mad at myself for
hoping—because I’m trying not to live in the future; I’m trying to remember
that having kids won’t make me more of a real person; and, on a less healthy
note, I have a superstitious belief that exciting news is always followed
closely by terrible news. So of course I proceeded to imagine being handed a
baby one day and some sort of You Have More Cancer certificate the next.

I know this is unlikely. I know they don’t make You Have
More Cancer certificates.

They do make T-shirts and tote bags, though.

Anyway, when I’m not thinking about ways my life could go
terribly wrong, I think about how I’ll try to prevent our kid’s life from going
terribly wrong, and how we’ll live with the knowledge that we can’t guarantee
it won’t.

“So, if we adopted a little black boy baby, how do we
tell him that there are certain ways he has to act to hedge his bets
safety-wise, while still sending him the message that he shouldn’t have to do those things?” I asked AK. “Like,
how do we let him know that it’s the world’s fault, not his, but still
encourage him to be strategic? Especially since I’m some white lady.”

AK reminded me that Barack Obama was raised by some white
lady and said, “I think you could relate as a woman. Even though there’s no
justification for rape, there are still precautions we take—places we don’t go
at certain times, that kind of thing.”

The old me tried to run from uncertainty. The new me
doesn’t exactly embrace it—see paragraph about how much I hate hope, above*—but
I don’t bother trying to preemptively worry my way out of it either. I can’t
just shoot my anxiety in the back. Also, I know I can handle shit. I think I
can raise a kid who will be able to handle shit. At least, I’m going to have
the audacity to hope so.

*And see episode of my/Emily Nussbaum’s/everyone I know’s
new favorite show Orange is the New Black,
in which Miss Claudette—a stoic Haitian woman rumored to be a voodoo
practitioner and murderer—lets a ray of hope crack her OCD shell for the first
time in decades. I can’t even describe the way her face transforms, but it pretty
much sums up all of human experience.

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